Every year, Hilario Ascasubi, a town in the south of Argentina’s Buenos Aires province, is invaded by tens of thousands of noisy cliff parrots that cause millions of dollars in damage.

The people of Hilario Ascasubi have been “under siege” by a giant colony of parrots for several years now, but many are complaining that things are getting worse every year. The parrot population is growing, and so is the level of property damage they cause. The green-feathered birds love nothing more than biting on electrical and internet wires, driving providers crazy in a neverending race to keep networks in working order. Bird droppings on sidewalks and streets are also a big problem, as is the constant noise the birds make night and day. Many of the 5,000 inhabitants of Hilario Ascasubi are at their wits’ end, claiming that they can’t go on living alongside the birds, but there isn’t much local authorities can do.

The town’s parrot problem is nothing new, and officials have been trying to deal with it, but nothing has worked. Noise bombs and laser lights have been used to drive the birds away, but they got used to them after a while and now they do not affect them. Because cliff parrots are a protected species in Argentina, harsher measures of dealing with them are strictly forbidden, so locals have no choice but to put up with their feathered neighbors.

According to a report from the Universidad Nacional del Sur (UNS) in Bahía Blanca at least 70,000 specimens of cliff parrots have been counted in Hilario Ascasubi which, when dusk falls, crowd together in trees and on power lines, darkening the sky. It is speculated that there are currently around 15 parrots for every human resident of the small town.

During the summer, the parrots migrate south to the cliffs of Patagonia for the breeding season, but then they return in even greater numbers and resume their invasion. Since they cannot be eradicated, some have called for the relocation of the giant colony, but no one really knows how such an operation can be conducted, or where to take the birds.

Although listening to the people of Hilario Ascasubi, you would think that the cliff parrots are the invaders, experts claim that the birds are actually refugees driven out of their natural habitat by human greed.

 

“There was a displacement, cities began to grow, they started with agriculture, with wheat and with livestock,” Paolo Sánchez Angonova, an agricultural engineer who has been studying parrot overpopulation since 2013, told La Nacion. “Then, from the south of the province of Buenos Aires, which is the Carmen de Patagones district up, deforestation occurred, which caused the parrot to lose its habitat. It comes from the forest, it fed on plant species from there and took shelter there, but it lost that to human expansion.”

As a result, the parrots looked for other places to settle and found that towns like Hilario Ascasubi had sources of drinking water and grain, such as sunflowers, which although not in their usual diet, provided enough sustenance. They adapted, and now they are thriving and giving humans a taste of their own medicine. And we don’t like it!